skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And yet, it's as simple as money ran out. They never turned a profit, investors ran out, the last round of funding was a loan with strings attached that led to a bunch of cost cutting and other poor decisions that explain the poor service quality.

A few staff guessed it might close 3 weeks ago at best though everything was very uncertain, but most of the accountants probably didn't see this coming either.

source: I know a few former employees.
It's the totality of experiences that make an individual. Most humans that I'm aware of have a greater totality of experiences that make them far smarter than any modern AI system.
Regardless of connection quality, the streaming bitrate will be far below bluray media.
This.

Tech still acts like it's the scrappy underdog, the computer in the broom cupboard where "the net" is a third space separate from reality, nerds and punks writing 16-bit games.

That ceased to be materially true around twenty years ago now. Once Facebook and smart phones arrived, computing touched every aspect of peoples' lives. When tech is all-pervasive, the internal logic and culture of tech isn't sufficient to describe or understand what matters.
The OP is comparing the "neuron count" of an LLM to the neuron count of animals and humans. This comparison is clearly flawed. Even you step back and say "well, the units might not be the same but LLMs are getting more complex so pretty soon they'll be like animals". Yes, LLMs are complex and have gained more behaviors through size and increased training regimes but if you realize these structure aren't like brains, there's no argument here that they will soon reach to qualities of brains.
> isn’t it your rights to protect your copyright?

Sure. But you don't have the right to harass people who haven't done so. I'm obviously not a lawyer, but I would imagine that at some point, vexatious litigation protections ought to kick in.
That's not the DMCA (a 90s law), though.
one of the things i like about working at very small companies is that i don't have to immediately have a solution to everything. i can file an issue and/or mention a bug or issue that i see or foresee when we talk. i can then let it marinate until it either becomes necessary to act on it or i think of a solution and have time to work on it, whichever comes first.

i often think of software as a series of problems. i don't have to worry about solutions initially. when we have polished off solutions to all of the truly immediately important problems - within some reasonable/useful level of engineering tolerances - the software can be thought of as done, for a time. just my opinion.
Because it’s almost always correct and feeding oxygen to conspiracies further pollutes the space and numbs people to when there really are sinister actors at play.

I think it’s a tricky situation. Most of the time it’s noise and unproductive. But we also don’t want to sterilize the environment so far that we can’t ever question things. There’s a tricky balance.
Require registered law firms to file these.

Yes, it'll cost money. But these fraudulent claims cost money, too.
The key thing is that assets of a 501c3 are irrevocably dedicated to charitable purposes, which is not the case for a 501c6. If the NFL had somehow started as a 501c3 before realizing that was a bad structure for their work, the standard approach would be for the 501c3 to sell their assets at fair market value to new for-profit. Then either those proceeds could be donated to other 501c3s, or the old NFL could continue as a foundation, applying those assets charitably.

(Not a lawyer, just someone interested in non-profits. I'm on the board of two, but that doesn't make me an expert in regulation!)
I hope so because I'm extraordinarily sick of the technology. I can't really ask a question at work without some jackass posting an LLM answer in there. The answers almost never amount to anything useful, but no one can tell since it looks clearly written. They're "participating" but haven't actually done anything worthwhile.
Consistently counting the occurrences of letter R in the word strawberry (or strawberrystrawberry).

Solving freshman physics and maths problems that are a variation of common problems (since they will solve the common problem and not the variation). My experience with this makes me completely confident that all the claims about OpenAI models solving whatever maths problems they claim to be solving are bogus. "Testing on training is all you need" basically.
The parent is probably referring to this benchmark: https://github.com/const-void/DOOM-fire-zig/
Off topic, but what is going on with the comments in this discussion? Seems like a ton of new accounts, and strange behavior like commenting gibberish or exact same comment text within minutes of each other, for example:

strattonoak 39 minutes ago | prev | next [–]

The no access to data smells like a ransomware event. Why is data not available to export out and everything is taken down and not accessible? Seems like it's way more work to take down access that to leave it up?

theoak 40 minutes ago | prev | next [–]

The no access to data smells like a ransomware event. Why is data not available to export out and everything is taken down and not accessible? Seems like it's way more work to take down access that to leave it up?
This is largely a side effect of mimicking the distribution on the internet via pretraining.

It's a good basis for setting up a model of the world since we have so much data and it's free.

Post-training techniques like DPO and RLHF are then about using minimal hand-curated data (expensive!) to shift that distribution closer to standard human / desired behavior.

It will continue to get better -- early versions of chat gpt were taught to say "I don't know" with something like 20 training examples and it got substantially better off of those. As that number of training examples increases with the amount of capital invested, there will be more patterns that get latched onto and expressed by attention in these models.

----

It will take time but they'll get pretty robust. Models will still be susceptible to Dunning-Kruger / ignorance. They aren't perfect AND it's in their training data thanks to us humans that they're copying.
Workaround-Oriented Programming
I want to seriously boost my Japanese vocabulary and kanji knowledge through reading. I'm already fluent, but my goal now is to reach a level where I feel comfortable and legitimate to request naturalization.
Ironically, despite the name "Hacker News", I've noticed many are quick to adopt the official narrative largely unquestioningly
next thing you know, health insurance companies will include whistleblowing as a dangerous activity and revoke your policy.
There is apparently an inexhaustible corps of these innumerate bozos. Computers simply do not use that much energy, even in aggregate, AI is a small piece of what people do with computers, and computers either are or can easily be powered by renewables.

By contrast there are 25000 civil aircraft in services, none of them are or could be powered by renewables, and every single one of them uses as much energy as a cloud datacenter. If anyone thought we were going "net zero" with all these airplanes they were mistaken.
> You can’t quantify what it brings to you

You can’t know until you’ve already walked through the one-way door. What about all of that aggregate regret and suffering for those who didn’t want, or don’t want after kids are here?

Humanity isn’t going to end because we empower people who don’t want kids to not have them, although the population will compress over the next 200 years (from 10B downward). There will always be parents who really want to be parents, as well as parents who thought they wanted to be but regret it.

For those who want to eat the glass, we salute you. Options for everyone else.
I really like how Kitty handles search. I thought it was a hack at first - then came to realize why re-implement search if less works better?
Please re-read my original comment.

"The AI systems need bodies to actually learn these things."

I never said this was impossible to achieve.
It's not the norm anywhere outside of Amsterdam I'd say, but indeed, we had a server/waiter(?) in a Greek restaurant in Limburg yesterday who spoke German but not Dutch (who looked like they might be from Greece so I doubt they were simply from Germany). Especially since the pandemic I've been noticing this more. I like the culture mingling, all the better that the Limburgians see foreigners aren't scary and evil, but I'm curious if it's a trend or if I'm just randomly noticing it more
I hear people talking about this all the time on here, so let me pose a couple scenarios for consideration:

A company has a dev team of 10 people. Hiring typically takes 3-4 months. Retention is ~2 years per employee. Assume the team size is stable. Is it morally acceptable to have an open role listed before anyone has quit?

A company has a team of 500 people. Hiring typically takes 1-2 months. Retention is ~ 2 years per employee. Assume the team size is stable. How many roles is it morally acceptable to have open before people have quit?
Start Tracking Your Unit Costs to Avoid Surprise Cloud Bills
This is an excellent idea! It would probably make the most sense to perform these adjustments on April 1.
if you can read German:

https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/volkswagen-konzern-daten...

https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2024/wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-s...
That could be a nail in the coffin to end VW, the EU GDPR is quite a sharp weapon.
They don’t just pass it on, they gain margin through more sales.

I was on a private school board and helped revamp their fundraising. The previous leadership team was cheap and focused on avoiding things like transaction fees. Well, they lost dollars chasing pennies. We boosted sales 25-30% just by adding card and contactless payment.
You're right, thanks for pointing that out. I missed adding the reference: Kammler DW. A First Course in Fourier Analysis. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press; 2008. Figure 1.19. This visualization of the relationships between time and frequency domains is a good illustration of Pontryagin duality applied to signal processing
...and there was much rejoicing in South Korea.

(Actually kidding. South Korea is going through too much shit right now to care about Do Kwon. But if times were simpler, there definitely would have been much rejoicing. We don't trust our own court much, when it comes to white-collar crimes.)

I hope he enjoys his long, long stay in America's prison system.
Comedy has some of the same. Some comedians look like they're just rambling through random ideas that have popped into their heads, when in fact it's a patter they've been practicing for months and months. I have a lot of respect for the ones who can hide the seams between their various jokes and make them look like the funny uncle at family gatherings just riffing off of people or themselves for an hour.
They are explaining how they see what they are doing as compliant with the law around 501c3s, which it arguably is. And they are putting a positive spin on it to make it less likely to be challenged, since the main ways this could be challenged involve government agencies and not suits from individuals.
WP Engine is both Mullenweg’s uncle and stepfather? It’s all starting to make sense.
There is another far worse option that you seem to be missing. Why keep any significant number of people around at all?
“It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution”
That is a strange thing to do…
hope this ends up in a museum
So we’re introducing new bugs to add a little extra spice?

Not trying to defend the code quality of OpenSSL, but the fallout of this bug affected everything and everyone and bad keys are still found 16 years later as of 2024.[1] And it was completely and utterly unnecessary - reporting the issue to upstream and fixing it upstream would have prevented the entire disaster.

[1]https://16years.secvuln.info/
I think it is simpler than that: people generally tend to work for companies who's products they think are interesting and useful. It's much easier to go into work each day when you think you're spending your time doing something useful.
I'm no big fan of OpenAI myself, but what he was whistleblowing over (OpenAI training on copyrighted material) is not really a secret, nor is it the kind of knowledge an organisation would kill over, even if he had evidence to present.

I hope the autopsy gives them peace, but I'm not expecting it to change the result :/
Tools like Sonar Qube are pretty shallow. Anecdotally, a robust development process will produce software that always reads clean on those scanners even if those scanners are not part of your development process. They detect defective development processes more than they detect defective code or designs.

Parts of the US DoD do have more rigorous testing that is considerably broader in scope than commercial linters and such, and evaluates for threats that commercial systems don't consider. Many of these tests reliably break open source software. It is unclear how thorough or exhaustive these audits or tests are -- it can be quite opaque. For good or bad, having been through several serious security audits by multiple organizations, my software always came back clean so it is difficult to calibrate their sensitivity from the outside.
I fully understand Sam Altman is a little finger and I no longer touch any openAI projects.

Claude has been fantastic and even Grok decent. Perplexity is also useful and I recommend anyone knowledgeable to avoid openAI’s grubby hands.
As a kid, I was so happy to "discover" that I could be mildly awake and control my dreams. It happened by mistake: I fell asleep while listening to loud music. I was in a middle state, half-awake because of the loud music, and half-asleep, dreaming. In the dream, I was an observer, aware that it was a dream. The music in the background was annoying me, and it was stressful. Later, I "improved" the technique and learned to control the dream while blocking out the annoying music.

Disclaimer:
My message before ChatGPT correcteded because my English isn't good enough to me:

As a kid I was so happy to "discover" that I can be mildly awake and control my dreams. It happen by mistake, I fall at sleep while listening music loudly, I was in a middle state of being awake because the loud music, and being sleep dreaming, in the dream I was as a observer, knowing that that was a dream, and with the music on the backround annoying me, it was stresfull. Later I "improved" the technique and was able to control the dream, and discard the annoying music.
Was there a suicide note?
The alternative here is accepting it’s perfectly reasonable to think that Sam Altman decided it would be a good idea to have an ex-employee (of no particular import) murdered for expressing their opinion on Twitter.
IMHO, a more important and testable difference is that humans don't have separate "train" and "infer" phases. We are able to adapt more or less on the fly and learn from previous experience. LLMs currently cannot retain any novel experience past the context window.
Language Model as Visual Explainer
Similar to the recent Boeing whistleblower conspiracies, despite video evidence of the suicide etc.

Currently we're in some sort of weird anti-business mood, so anything that's negative about a perceived mega-corp is taken literally on social media, and amplified up to 11 by karma-farming bots.
Does it matter what color the rat is?
Hey we don't have multi-currency support (yet) but it's on the roadmap

And we can help with 2024 catchup

You can book a free demo here, excited to help if we can: https://www.doola.com/bookkeeping/book-a-demo/
Really cool idea and fast response times, nice job! I noticed after a few searches the results seem to get less accurate, however. Pins dropping in the ocean, etc.
There are solidly legal and solidly illegal ways to do this, and a range of options in between. My reading of what they are doing is that it is pretty far toward the legal end of this spectrum, and the key question will be whether whether the non-profit is appropriately compensated for its stake in the for-profit.

Explaining reduces the chance that they're challenged by the IRS or attorney general, since that is a political process.
I don’t think this stuff will be truly revolutionary until I can train it at home or perhaps as a group (SETI at home anybody?)

Six million is a start but this tech won’t truly be democratized until it costs $1000.

Obviously I’m being a little cheeky but my real point is… the idea that this technology is in the control of massive technology companies is dystopian as fuck. Where is the RMS of the LLM space? Who is shouting from every rooftop how dangerous it is to grant so much power and control over information to a handful of massive tech companies, all whom have long histories of caving into various government demands. It’s scary as fuck.
I think even in the EU, VW group is "too big to fail".
In some cases yes. In this case, in my opinion it can be strictly wrong.

The GPU requirements of a terminal are _minuscule_ even under heavy load. We're not building AAA games here, we're building a thing that draws a text grid. There is no integrated GPU on the planet that wouldn't be able to keep a terminal going at an associated monitor's refresh rate.

From a technical standpoint, there is zero downside whatsoever to always using the integrated GPU (the stance Ghostty takes) and plenty of upside.
We have been with dogs for such a long time, I wouldn’t be surprised if we also have adaptations to bond with dogs.

I mean dogs came with us to the Americas, and even to Australia. Both the Norse and the Inuit took dogs with them to Greenland.
I hope so, but for different reasons. Agreed they spit out plenty of gibberish at the moment, but they’ve also progressed so far so fast it’s pretty scary. If we get to a legitimate artificial general super intelligence, I’m about 95% sure that will be terrible for the vast, vast majority of humans, we'll be obsolete. Crossing my fingers that the current AI surge stops well short of that, and the push that eventually does get there is way, way off into the future.
Why is nobody talking about the fact that this should not be possible? There is precisely zero reason for them to have this location data. Give the CEO one year of jail per person whose location was illegally tracked.
That's exactly what happens when AI realism fades from the picture: inflated expectations followed by disappointments. We need more realistic visions, and we need them fast: https://open.substack.com/pub/transitions/p/why-ai-realism-m...
Zero and zero. Since you know what your turnover rate is and the lead time to hire, you need to size your team appropriately to provide adequate slack in case of turnover. Then you can hire people in a professional and respectful manner.
So the first email was from a Protonmail account, and the second one was spoofed and obviously had incorrect headers. Are you saying Youtube doesn't check for these when processing take-down requests?
This is where I stand. I think corporations have assassinated whistleblowers in the past, maybe even the very recent past, but I don't see what they stand to gain here unless they were just sending a message to everyone else.
I use coding libraries which are either custom, recent or haven't gained much traction. Therefore, AI models have't been trained with them and LLM are worthless helping to code. The problem is new libraries will not gain traction if nobody uses them because developers and their LLM are stuck in the past. The evolution of open source code has become stagnant.
Do Kwon was accused of misleading investors.

Has anyone been able to work out how he misled people yet?
Most people just don’t know much about drones or planes really. They don’t know how their brain interprets what it sees. Etc

It’s obviously just mass hysteria.
But America didn’t vote anti-business at all so it’s just more rage posting on Facebook and Reddit that doesn’t do anything. If they want to blame someone, they need to look in the mirror.
It’s not about whether an argument can be made where becoming a for profit aligns with goals. The more general issue is whether one should be able to raise money with the pretext of a non-profit, pay no taxes, and later decide to take it all private.

In that case, why shouldn’t original funders be retroactively converted to investors and be given a large part of the ownership?
Mathematician Reveals New Enigmas for Time Travelers
> If you have social anxiety, then you should probably talk to a therapist to try to reduce and manage your anxiety.

One of the difficult things about Social Anxiety, at least for me, is that talking to a therapist is just about the most anxiety inducing thing I could do.
Documenting why a proposal wouldn't work might be valuable even if a better solution is not immediately available, then at least people are aware of potential problems and perhaps temporarily workaround them.

Depending on what's the worst outcome of "wouldn't work", keeping silent might be worse than making enemies.
Actually, I'm comparing the "neuron-neuron connection count," while admitting that the comparison is not apples-to-apples.

This kind of comparison isn't a new idea. I think Hans Moravec[a] was the first to start making these kinds of machine-to-organic-brain comparisons, back in the 1990's, using "millions of instructions per second" (MIPS) and "megabytes of storage" as his units.

You can read Moravec's reasoning and predictions here:

https://www.jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.pdf

---

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Moravec
Using openrouter, a bunch of models fail on this. Sonnet 3.5 so far seems to be the best at saying it doesn't know, other than perhaps o1 pro, but once that has said "no" (which can be triggered more by telling it to respond very concisely) it seems very stuck and unable to say they don't exist. Letting it ramble more and so far it's been good.

Google's models for me have been the worst, lying about what's even been said in the messages so far, quoting me incorrectly.
> Sam Altman decided

What is more plausible is a "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" [1] situation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
Thanks. I find it astonishing.

Its similar to (not quite covered by?) Poe's law. It honestly read to be like a parody of Matt.
Would anyone start and build their business on Wordpress in 2025?

I would be surprised, it seems like such a dumpster fire to get into and who knows what insanity Matt will be up to next week
Punishment for misdeeds is a component of justice.
We rely on the OS to tell us when we're obscured, and macOS will only tell us if the window is fully obscured (1 pixel showing is not obscured).
This would be reasonable if Terra was a clear scam. But it wasn’t.

Terra was a successful blockchain.

Investors lost money and they had to blame the leader.
yes indeed. But I see more and more people arguing against the very possibility of AGI. Some people say statistical models will always have a margin of error and as such will have some form of reliability issues: https://open.substack.com/pub/transitions/p/here-is-why-ther...
I can't tell. Are you saying it's not?
Why not feed the library code and documentation to the LLM? Using it as a knowledge base is bound to be limited. But having it be your manual-reading buddy can be very helpful.